Dominique Ansel is part pastry chef, part cult leader. He describes a soufflé with unflinching eye contact and drool-inducing detail. His marble-tiled bakery, in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, resembles a temple to airy, flaky, crusty idols of pastry.

Yet the world of food blogs, the name Dominique Ansel is almost synonymous with one word: cronut.

This causes Ansel no small amount of pain. The cronut, equal parts donut and croissant, inspired numerous knockoffs and lines of salivating foodies after Ansel introduced the world to it last May. Ansel, by all accounts a serious chef who was nominated this year for a prestigious James Beard Foundation award, has been backed into acting as a stage manager for the flaky, creamy little usurper.

“If you are the first in line, you’ll see me,” says Ansel, who unlocks the door every morning at 8am to dozens of expectant faces. He’s known for urging patrons not to buy cronuts on Craigslist, a corner of which has become a black market for the pastry. Blinding sun, pouring rain, sleet and snow have done little to dissuade fanatics from surrounding the Dominique Ansel Bakery. Staff are known to issue detailed, friendly cronut explainers to the odd tourist who expects to get a cronut any time after 8.30am.

No one is allowed to jump the line, Ansel’s own family included. The only loosened rule in the cronut’s short history: a man, first in line at 4am, carrying an airline boarding pass. His goal: proving he needed a cronut before the bakery opened so he could use it to propose to his girlfriend. Ansel’s team sold him a cronut at 7am, and the man rushed off to his 8.30am flight and, possibly, wedded bliss.

You can guess what it’s like to deal with this kind of thing most days. Though Ansel seems both amused and flattered, his expertise as a chef and business owner doesn’t extend to hijinks like panicky suitors.

Ansel, who spent six years working as an executive pastry chef at Daniel Boulud’s Daniel and helped expand French gourmet food company Fauchon, says “the world of pastries is ripe for exploring. There are millions of things that can be done, hundreds of recipes”. The cronut threatens to overtake his reputation, and Ansel, whipping out airy madeleines and salted caramel eclairs, is determined to not be known just as the guy who came up with it.

“I don’t want the creation” – he calls the cronut “the creation,” as a wry Dr Frankeinstein might have referred to his monster – “to kill our creativity”, Ansel says. “We are actually more known for our creativity than the cronut. And people come because they know we do things that are unusual.”

Thus the burning eyes he lends to his latest invention: the magic soufflé. It never deflates, and the recipe is a secret. Then listen to Ansel’s spontaneous treatise on his latest, frozen s’mores – a confection made of ice cream wrapped in a light wafer inside a marshmallow that is set aflame in front of you – and your mind may wander from hunger.

Dominique Ansel is both a chef and a business owner. Photograph: Thomas Schauer/Courtesy of Dominique Ansel Bakery

To find out more about the life after the cronut, we sat down with Ansel in his bakery and spoke about the differences between being a chef and a business owner, growing up poor in France and the importance of giving back. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Why did you decide to start your own bakery?

When I first started the bakery, a lot of people were telling me: ‘Do not only do pastries. It’s not going to work. A pastry shop in New York is not going to work. People don’t go for just pastries. You have to have a big lunch menu and ton of sandwiches.’ And I did not really want to listen to anyone.

I had my idea of how I wanted to make pastries and where I wanted to take the pastry world. And I found a way to really give people different perception of what pastries are – it’s not always this really big tall cake that is rich with buttercream and is sweet and spongy. That’s not it. Pastries can be really refined, can be very delicate and creative, artistic. That’s something that’s very important for me.

You grew up in a poor neighborhood in France, and now devote some of your profits in giving back to similar neighborhoods here in the US. Why is that an important part of your business?

I never forgot where I was from. When I was younger, there were days when I was really hungry, when my parents couldn’t afford to buy much food. Sometimes, we had just bread and we didn’t really have much money to buy food. And nowadays, in a big city like New York, people kind of forget because there’s a lot of food, a lot of restaurants, but there is still a lot of people who are hungry in the city. It’s something I don’t forget and will never forget.

When I have a chance to use the passion that people have for my product and I can use it towards something that’s going to do a lot of good for other people, it’s a chance for me to do something good. When I saw that I could help and do something like auctioning cronuts, for example, at a charity auction, I happily did it. It’s a little bit of extra work, but you just donate some of your time and energy to do something. With all the money we raised last year, we fed hundreds of thousands of people between the Food Bank for New York and God’s Love We Deliver auction against hunger. There was one auction where we sold 12 cronuts for over $14,000.

An original Cronut from the New York bakery Dominque Ansel. Photograph: Dominique Ansel

Do you feel that more businesses should have social missions?

Absolutely, especially when it comes to your city and your neighborhood, you should just look around and see that people have needs and sometimes it just takes for you to be willing to do this extra work to help them. People tend to forget, because you have a decent situation, you always have food, you always have meal with your family, but you forget that people need your help sometimes.

What’s different now that you are a business owner in addition to being a chef?

You constantly have to make decisions and keep improving, training your staff, building a team. I think the biggest difference is that when you are a chef, you mostly focus on working in the kitchen. When you are a business owner, you are more focused on growing your business and the demands of your clients, and especially building a culture of your business. When you are a chef in the kitchen, people always look up to you and they always follow your lead. When you are a business owner, you have more things that you don’t deal with when you are a chef. So building a culture is really having a philosophy on how to deal with things.

For example, when we first had the line outside the bakery, it was very important for me to decide to sell to them and to acknowledge that they were here. So in the morning right now, we pass [out] hot chocolate, fresh baked mini-madeleines, hand-warmers. It’s very important for me to keep focusing on my customers as soon as they get to us, not just when they walk into the shop. It’s not something that a chef would necessarily think about. But as a business owner, you have to take that into consideration.

That’s another example. I like to be close to my customers. They thought of coming early on the cold day [and] I want to make sure they have at least something nice, something sweet from us, just to let them know that we know they are there. It’s cold and I really want to take good care of them.

I also saw you tweet some wishes from your wishing tree. Were you flattered by some of those?

Yea. We did a wishing tree for valentine’s day that we left here inside the bakery and we invited people to just write a wish and put it on the tree. Actually, a lot of people played along and we had some sweet ones.

Many of them wished for a cronut, a product that you recently trademarked. Was that an important decision for you to make?

This is one of those decisions that you make as a business owner, not as a chef. The trademark of the cronut was a very important decision for us. [The trademark application] was a suggestions from a lawyer that cares for us and she suggested this to protect us. As a chef, you don’t really know if you need to do this. We really quickly realized that a lot of small business owners are just bullied by [bigger companies]. If you don’t protect your trademark, they will try to register the name before you do and they will stop you from using your creation.

Exactly. It’s really important for me as a small business owner to stand up and say ‘I am going to protect my trademark.’ This is my creation and I am going to protect it so that I can ensure I can continue making it.

I found it very interesting that when people ask you why don’t you just make more cronuts, you’ve said “You don’t go to a doctor and tell him to make more surgeries.” You emphasize quality over quantity. Is that part of your philosophy?

It’s the same reason that you don’t ask writer to write four times more articles. I want to control the quality of the product. I want to sell people a good quality product for a fair price. A lot of people also ask me, why don’t you sell out to a big factory and make tons of money? But this isn’t about money.

This is what we believe in. It’s not about making tons and trying to sell as many as you can. It’s about making a very good, very high-end quality product and giving people the best experience. It’s not about raising the price for cronuts or selling it for twice more. Would they still sell out? Probably yes. But I don’t want to treat my customers like that. I want them to have a fair price for a fair product. This is what I believe in.

Some people say “Well, what else can you do with a pastry business?” You’ve proven that there is room for innovation and creativity. And you have previously mentioned that you have many more ideas. Why is it so important to stay creative?

I think it’s the same for every field. Knowing that you did something well, it’s not enough for this world. For example, if Van Gogh had only painted one painting and stopped there, no one would know about him. You start a new trend, you really explore your field and you go beyond what you know and what can be done. Beyond what people think can be done. There’s no limit if you are creative, flexible and have imagination. It’s just a matter of really understanding your customer and understanding what they are looking for.

We see it here at the bakery a lot. For example, in the beginning, I made a point to change the menu every six to eight weeks, which is very unusual for a bakery. People would change a menu once, twice a year. We change it very often, as often as a restaurant. In the beginning, people were coming back and were sad not to find the pastries that they saw a month or so ago. But now people come back and they are excited about new items and they are excited about change.

They bring new friends, they bring family here. There is this energy, this willingness to stay open minded and learn about new things that New York has. It’s really an exciting place for a chef to be.

According to Dominique Ansel, New York is an exciting place for a chef to be. Photograph: Thomas Schauer/Courtesy of Dominique Ansel Bakery

In our earlier email correspondence, you told me “Never get lazy and let your creation kill your creativity.” Do you also encourage your staff to be creative?

Totally. Yeah. It’s very important for me. It’s part of our culture. I always say I don’t want the creation to kill the creativity. A creation – one of them was a cronut – I don’t want us to stop yet and kill our creativity. We can do a lot more. We can do so many more things and it’s very important for me to have my staff involved in this aspect so I always push them to think out of the box, to think differently. Because they also have ideas. Because they also have different experience and sharing and seeing my staff growing with me, it’s something that is very unique and amazing for me.

You previously helped expand Fauchon into places like Russia, Egypt …

… Kuwait …

What have you learned from that? Was it different than setting up your own business?

I learned a lot. I’ve learned all the things you should and shouldn’t do. Fauchon’s concept overseas was really copy-and-paste, it was a replica of what it was in Paris, which [in] some places works very well, and [in] some others, not at all. I think for me, it’s very important for business to have a mindful growth but to also understand the market. If I were to open a place, a bakery a block away, it would have to be different. It would have to fit to the neighborhood, to have its own identity and personality. As a business owner you really adapt your concept, your ideas, your product, your service based on the location and your customers.

This is one of the most important things I have learned with Fauchon.

When you first came up with the cronut – there was a lot of attention. How did you feel about all of that attention?

At first, it was a little bit overwhelming. You know it’s not something that we were expecting. The first day that we launched cronut, someone from Grub Streeet came here and took a photo of it and posted it. It was a small article, just like a write-up of something new that we were doing because we always do something new. The same night, they called us and they told us they had increase of traffic of 300%. They technically told us they had never seen anything like this and that we should be ready to get busy.

The first day I made maybe like 35? The second day, I decided to make 50. The first day we sold out in about 15 minutes. The second day in 10. And by the third day, we had a line of about 100 people waiting outside before work by the doors. And that’s how the crazy began. I was really shocked. And we were not ready [laughs] to have a line of people outside the shop. We had very busy lines in the morning before the cronut, but not that amount of people coming for one product. It was something really unexpected.

This was all word-of-mouth advertising.

People often ask, ‘Was it a PR strategy?’ And we are like ‘No, not at all’. There is no PR strategy, there is no PR team, there’s nothing that’s planned. We do things naturally.

I do things that are genuine, with my heart and when I decide to buy few dozen roses to give to our first few customers in line, it’s because I believe that it’s a special day for them. And if I can make it a little more special for them and happier for them, I will do it.

[In the morning], the most exciting part is really being at the register and see people leave the shop, saying goodbye to each other after standing on the line together. They spend time together. They exchange emails. They exchange phone numbers.

You could start a cronut match-making service.

[Laughs] They really become friends. It doesn’t matter where they are from, which part of the world, what part of the city they are from. They talk and befriend each other.

Do you have friends and family ask you for a cronut?

Not all of them, because they know I don’t make exceptions.

They would have to get on the line.

Most of them, friends and family, have actually never tried a cronut. I’ve made rules since the very beginning and I have to stand by them. Everyone, all of my close friends and family, knows that they shouldn’t ask me. My answer would be the same as for everyone: they should wait in the line. That’s something I believe in, fairness for everyone. Good quality product for a fair price and everyone being treated equally.

You had a special Valentine’s Day menu. How did it go?

It was amazing. That was our busiest day so far. And it was also last year. This year we have done everything in pink and we had – and this is very funny – most of our clients are actually gentlemen.

Really?

Yes, for Valentine’s Day. For that day, we would see a good 80% of customers that are men. And when they walk into the shop with the hearts, and the cases are all pink, and we’re playing love songs, and there are rose petals all over the floor, it’s all very feminine. It’s not a place where you would expect men to be, but they are all very smiley, and a little bit shy and they ask about recommendations.

At Dominique Ansel Bakery, customers have a variety of treats to choose from. It’s not all about the cronut. Photograph: Thomas Schauer/Courtesy of Dominique Ansel Bakery

Well, I guess they have figured out what women have known all along: that the way to the heart is through the stomach.

You got it.

Do you feel that French have different relationship with food than Americans?

Completely. Yes. [laughs]

How different would you say they were?

There’s a lot more tradition and roots and history [in France]. France is a little bit more conservative when it comes to food. They know what they like and they like what they know. They don’t like change too much. They like the things they have tasted before. They like French food.

New Yorkers, Americans are completely different. They are a lot more open-minded. They travel a lot more. They are willing to discover new flavors, new textures and just new things from all over the world. That’s why I think New York is one of the most exciting food scenes in the world today. And I firmly believe this, because I’ve had some of my best meals ever in New York.

So what’s next for your bakery?

Well, right now I am writing a book, a cookbook with Simon & Schuster to come out in October of this year. So that’s what’s right now.

And then when it comes to expansion – any healthy and safe business should expand. It should be a mindful growth and it should take into consideration, as I said earlier, the place, the location, the customers, the concept. To me, it’s not just opening something. There should be something really unique and special about it, something that has a heart, something that people believe in.

The latest double-whammy of a dessert is the waffogato – a combination of waffle-shaped ice-cream with maple syrup espresso. Is there no end to this crossover creativity? Let's hope not, says Tony Naylor